Ford's Alan Mulally responded. (In 2007, Mulally's compensation ran to nearly twenty-two million dollars.) Barack Obama, thanks to his resig- nation from the Senate, will not have to vote on any bailout package that makes it to the floor. So far, at least, whenever he has been asked for his position, he has been noncommittal. On the one hand, he has called the carmakers "the backbone of Ameri- can manufacturing" and said that "we need to provide assistance" to them; on the other, he has stated, 'We can't just write a blank check to the auto industry." But even though he's between offices, the situation doesn't leave Obama-the champion of "change we can believe in" -off the hook. If the au- tomakers' difficulties can be traced to a single, essential failure, it is their belief that they could avoid change. This is evident in their management structure, their labor contracts, and, most conse- quentially, their cars. For the past thirty years, the Big Three have been prom- ising one hyper-efficient vehicle after another-the electric car, the "super car," the hydrogen car-only to pro- duce bigger and bigger gas guzzlers. (It was while the carmakers were suppos- edly working together, and with a bil- lion dollars of federal money, to create a "new generation of vehicles" that G.M. purchased the rights to the Hummer.) The only compelling argu- ment the companies can make at this late date-if a man strapped with ex- plosives can be said to be making an ar- gument-is that they will not suffer alone. 'What would it mean if the domes- tic industry were allowed to fail?" G.M.'s Wagoner asked last month. "The cost would be catastrophic. . . . That's why this is all about a lot more than just Detroit." Together, the Big Three employ some two hundred and fifty thousand people, and, as the automakers correctly point out, mil- lions of other Americans-from the machinist at the tire factory to the wai t- ress at the corner bar-indirectly de- pend on them for jobs. Were these jobs to be lost, the effect would ripple out through the economy, producing what Paul Krugman, on MSNBC, re- cently called "a huge anti-stimulus pro- 36 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 8, 2008 gram at exactly the wrong moment." It would, of course, be foolish to allow the American economy to col- lapse in order to make a point. And it's possible to conclude that the Big Three deserve on every front to fail and still decide to rescue them. But such a deci- sion will itself be a form of temporiz- ing, and will only pass the problems on to the next Administration. Real change-as opposed to the kind in slo- gans-is hard and, by definition, dis- ruptive. If Obama has any intention of fulfilling his campaign promises, sooner or later he's going to have to face up to that. -Elizabeth Kolbert DEPT. OF VISUALIZATION THE PITS f\. \ , '. . II ! OW ö_ ,. m , ' . ' , - ' o :U -- , J6\ : , _ :,.:-- - _:--_Jo.="'-':."'''':.. ..... , ]{ Talking or riding along the ave- V V nues, you can imagine the store- fronts without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verg- ing on default, unable to lure replace- ments. It's a feasible scenario, if you consider the consumer-confidence and consumer-price indices, the wealth de- struction, all the layoffs and trickle- down effects, and the allegedly unre- lated possibility, as the Times reported last week, that "something funny is hap- pening on the dark side of the universe." ("A better and more enticing explana- tion for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space"- and here we were blaming Alan Green- span.) A friend who worked in South- east Asia in the nineteen -nineties, during the recession there, recalls visit- ing Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict super- structures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vi- sion here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washington Mutual's cashless vestibules or the bare aisles of Circuit City. 'What will it look like?" is a ques- tion of the hour, as people try to visu- alize the ways in which life will change in New York as a result of the finan- cial and economic crisis. In the mind's eye, we tend to populate our recession- ary streets with squad cars painted green, cat's-eyed ambulances, and other anachronisms-"Fort Apache, the Bronx: The Remake." But, really, the city will probably just look the way it does now. After an extraordinary era of construction and renovation, demolition and replacement, there will almost certainly come a long pe- riod in which little to nothing gets built. Putting aside the long-discussed public projects that are endangered or doomed (the Second Avenue Subway, the West Side Railyards, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Moynihan Station, etc.), dozens of private undertakings have stalled or died. The calls go out to the architects: pencils down. We have in- herited, from the good years, a glut of housing, almost all of it of the unaffordable kind-condos galore- and an increase in office space amid a sudden, steep decrease in the need for it. Throw in the high cost, or total un- availability, of capital, owing to the credit freeze, and you have a New York that may be frozen in time. The skyline, which has been very dynamic recently, like a stereo's equalizer dis- play, should sit still for a while. The clothes in our closets today will be the ones we're wearing when we're old. Keep an eye on the construction pits that developers dug to make way for the foundations of new build- ings. The town is pocked with them. The real-estate boom fostered grand schemes, which, though they are in many cases now stillborn, began with holes in the ground. The expiration, earlier this year, of a tax-abatement law, 421-a, encouraged residential builders to dig quickly, to achieve grandfather status and thus better financing. Hence a sudden spate of new pits, some that builders may have had no intention of filling soon any- way. In some cases, if a developer hasn't already paid for the steel, he will be inclined, or forced, to walk away. Buildings that are halfway built tend